What Is the Colour Out of Space?

The Colour Out of Space is not a creature. The dossier calls it a contaminating presence: an alien something that arrived embedded in a meteorite and leached outward into the soil, the water and the living things nearby. It corresponds to no colour in the visible spectrum, which is why the witnesses could give it no better name. It feeds on vitality rather than flesh, and it leaves everything it touches subtly wrong first and catastrophically wrong afterward.

The farm

The place is the Gardner farm, five acres in the hills west of Arkham, and what the witnesses found is now called the Blasted Heath. The meteorite came down in the Gardners' field and shrank, and then vanished, within a matter of days, after three professors from Miskatonic University had taken samples and failed to explain them. The crops that followed grew large and could not be eaten. The animals went wrong in ways that the account gives in order, and the family went the same road.

Why the heath is still there

The record is that ground poisoned by whatever the meteorite deposited is still visibly wrong years after every trace of the meteorite itself had gone. The surveyor who gives the second half of the account arrived to scout a planned reservoir, and found the locals unwilling to give him directions. The reservoir was meant to bury the matter with the heath. The Archive stamps the locality SUPPRESSED, and the Field Survey marks it as a conjectured pin in the hills west of Arkham.

On the screen

Two productions on file adapt the account: Die, Monster, Die! (1965), which moves it to England and is filed DECOY, and Color Out of Space (2019), filed UNACCOUNTED and the closer of the two.